The digital transformation supports many cities on the way to becoming smarter cities, enabling them to enhance digital processes, care about climate-friendly goals, or improve the quality of life of their citizens. However, such changes usually take place step by step and not in a big-bang approach. In order for the direction of the digital transformation to be defined, it is necessary to know and understand the needs and requirements of all relevant stakeholders who will be affected or are intended to use the new digital solutions. As our environment, a smart city district, is currently under construction, we do not know most of the future stakeholders yet. Therefore, we had to find new ways of eliciting the needs and requirements for digital solutions without knowing, e.g., the citizens who will live in the future district. We show a framework of the procedures we followed, classified into (a) vision and concepts, (b) smart city district digital ecosystem, and (c) dissemination and events. We substantiate the processes with example results and provide a discussion on how we evaluate our solutions with respect to future applicability. Because evaluations are only very limited in our setting right now, we focus on four lead questions to argue why the procedures and results are adequate and share the lessons we learned on this path towards a digital smart city district.
It is commonly known that software or system development processes are very important for getting a high-quality product. Such processes can be described in many different ways, from textual documents to existing modeling notations. Before dealing with the overall goal of improving the description of development processes, this paper evaluates the current state of practice regarding process descriptions and reasons for that. A major focus is on the degree of formality. Based on an interview guideline, a series of 12 interviews was conducted in German companies of different sizes. The results were analyzed to come up with the current usage of and need for software process models or descriptions. In general, our results confirm the literature statement that in industrial practice the majority of processes descriptions are detailed but rather focus on informal descriptions than formal notations or models. Nevertheless, they use semiformal process descriptions containing different graphical, table-based, or structured-text elements for representation. It is interesting that even if companies do not want to use formal models; they would like to have their advantages and even often have the detailed information necessary for formal models. Overall, our findings provide evidence on the state of practice regarding usage of process descriptions and models and show the need for future work in this area
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